Kevin Meyer

Life and leadership at the nexus of lean and zen.

Herb Kelleher: Creating Economic Value Based on Human Values

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A legendary CEO, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, passed away last week.  Many articles have already been written memorializing him, including this one by Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review and this one by our friend Mark Graban, but I’d like to reinforce a couple attributes that are important to me.

The key to Kelleher’s success was his focus on people – customers, employees, and suppliers.  He epitomized the “respect for people” (or “human nature“) pillar of lean and demonstrated how effective and powerful humble, authentic, and empathetic leadership can be.  Bill writes,

As I take stock of his life and legacy, what strikes me is how much all of us can learn from what he created and how he led—that you can create vast economic value based on genuine and generous human values, why what you hope to achieve in the marketplace must be reflected in what you build in the workplace, how in an age of disruption and transformation, simplicity and consistency matter most.

Southwest’s mission was to “democratize the skies” by making it easy and affordable for everyone to fly.  Kelleher and Southwest succeeded, and to this day reinforces this mission by eschewing tactics such as charging for carry on baggage.   Kelleher viewed corporate rules as guideposts, but not walls, and encouraged his employees to “serve the customer regardless of what the rules were.”

Continue reading on the Gemba Academy blog…

Midnight at the Gemba

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In the late 1990s I was working in the Silicon Valley for a Fortune-50 medical device company, responsible for a drug infusion pump manufacturing operation.  I had just completed a crazy period where I had also “temporarily” (months and months…) led the advanced engineering department after that manager had transferred to a different location.  I was finally settling back into one job when I was offered a position to run the company’s largest molding facility in a different state.  Of course I accepted, without asking more than a couple questions.

A month later I arrived to a large operation with 60 heavy presses in a monster cleanroom, running at full capacity, 24/7/365, to make medical device components for other company operations throughout the world.  And it was several months behind schedule.  Downstream plants were shutting down every week, the scrutiny (“help”) from corporate was enormous, and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much for a while.

How do you increase capacity, quickly, when you’re already pushing every machine to the limit, around the clock?

This became my introduction to lean.  We went down the traditional path of spending millions on new presses, which had a lead time of a few months.  In the meantime I also did some research and came across the Association for Manufacturing Excellence where some fine gents like Doc Hall, Dan McDonnell, and Dave Hogg taught me about quick changeover.  By the time the new presses arrived we had caught up with demand and were even starting to think about retiring old presses.  I was hooked on lean and it changed the trajectory of my career.  Gemba Academy, and our strong support of AME, is one way I try to give back to help others be similarly successful.

But that’s not the point of this story.  Those of you who have worked at 24/7 facilities know that the night shifts can be a bit crazy – or even scary.  This operation worked a 4/3/3/4 rotation of 12 hour shifts, which gives the benefit of long weekends but can be pretty grueling long hours.  I soon learned about some “interesting” issues on the night shift.  Let’s just say that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll covers about 50% of it, with the other half being quality and productivity.  Which is how you’d like critical medical device components to be made, right?  Perhaps I should have asked a few more questions before taking the job?

On the positive side I had a terrific staff that genuinely wanted to improve the operation.  They gave a young kid like me a lot of support, even when I started trying those crazy lean ideas that my new AME friends were telling me about.  But even before we dug into quick changeover, and before I knew what a “gemba” was, I knew we had to get those issues on the night shift resolved.

I thought a big reason for the issues was lack of attention and awareness by the managers, who primarily worked the day shift.  So I had my first idea: once a month we’d have our staff meeting at midnight.

You can imagine how that went over.  Ka-boom.

To their credit, my entire extended staff (I requested that supporting managers from QA, finance, HR, etc also attend) really did show up for that first meeting, even though some of them had an hour commute.  We went over the usual agenda items for a half hour, then we all went and walked around.  We met people we had never seen before, talked to supervisors, and experienced the operation at night.  What was planned to be a one hour meeting actually ended around 3am… there was just so much to see and learn.

We realized that the issues weren’t just due to a lack of awareness by the day shift managers, but were usually driven by the night shift feeling like they were being ignored and unsupported.  They also experienced unique problems ranging from being unable to quickly change to a new job due to lack of materials control and QA support to having a much worse break and “lunch” experience due to the cafeteria and nearby fast food options being closed.  Snowy parking lots weren’t plowed at night, without natural light the factory felt more dark and cold, and the perception was that they were outcasts and loners even though many wanted that shift for a variety of reasons – usually to support their families.

Our eyes were opened, we paid attention, and we took action.  Over the next several months most of the issues were resolved and the productivity and quality of the night shift began to match the day shift.  We were also able to capture and capitalize on the ideas and creativity of that shift, and since they had operated so independently they were actually better at developing and implementing solutions than the day shift.

As Toyota’s Fujio Cho famously said, “Go see, ask why, show respect.”

Before we even knew about Toyota and lean, we realized the power of going to the gemba, discarding preconceived beliefs, and listening to and supporting the people.  When we soon began to try quick changeover and then other lean tools, that respect paved the way for more support, enthusiasm, and results.

Are you respecting all of your people and tapping their potential?

Thinking About Thinking

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For the past several years I’ve been fascinated by how we think – and how that affects us, our leadership, and the organizations we’re a part of.  A couple years ago I wrote about the beginner’s mind and the various forms of bias, particularly confirmation bias.  Over the past couple months I’ve read three books that have expanded my view of how the world around us can influence how we think, and they have made me wonder about the impact on observation, discovery, and problem solving.

Factfulness What If We're Wrong Leonardo Da Vinci

First off was Factfulness by Hans Rosling.  Why do our perceptions seem to err to the negative when it comes to facts and opinions about the world?  In the last fifty years the percentage of people living in poverty has fallen from 50% to less than 9%.  90% of girls (and 92% of boys) worldwide attend primary school, and violent crime has fallen significantly everywhere, yes including the U.S..  There are similar stories for the vaccination rate, deaths from disease, and deaths from war.  Not every statistic, of course, but many of the ones we often read about.

After millions of years of evolution our brains are wired to look for the dramatic and to pay attention to the negative as that often signals potential danger.  In addition, we also retain a frame of reference partially governed by facts fed to us in our early education – which for some of us can be forty or fifty years ago.

Perhaps most importantly, it is difficult for us to recognize the compounding effect of slow but continuous improvement.  It’s not “dramatic” and there is also little incentive for journalists to report on it so we simply may not hear about it.

Next up was But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman.  Yes, the cover is really upside down.  Klosterman’s books are always a bit of a crazy treat as he likes to dive into unusual subject areas, but they are enjoyable and thought-provoking.  In this book he tries to “take a look at this present as if it were the past.”  In effect, many years from now, what will people think of us?

He dives into a variety of topics such as music, literature, the plight of the Native Americans, architecture, and physics.  Klosterman interviews a variety of people, often on two sides of a perspective on a single topic, for example Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Green on whether we believe our understanding of current physics will remain solid into the future.

Aristotle created an understanding of gravity that was accepted for almost two thousand years until it was upended by Newton, whose version was significantly tweaked by Einstein just relatively recently.  Tyson argues that thanks to the rigor of math-based experimental physics over the past century, current theories will stand the test of time.  Green believes we have only scratched the surface and our current understanding will appear analogous to old theories we’ve discarded and sometimes even ridicule.  How quantum physics is beginning to link the physical world with consciousness and the incredible unknowns of a potential multiverse makes me lean toward Green’s position.

Finally, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci is easily the most intriguing and well-written biography I’ve ever read – on anyone.  At over 600 pages it is daunting, but after you start it is hard to put down.  Like a typical biography, I learned about his stupendous intellect – such that he had inferred the first and third laws of motion two hundred years before Newton and figured out how the heart’s aortic valve worked more than four hundred years before medical science.

But where Isaacson really shines is his description of Da Vinci as a human and his creative process.  He had no ego, loved knowledge for the sake of knowledge, didn’t compete with other intellectuals, and didn’t care what other people thought of him.  Unlike another genius of his era, Michelangelo, he was comfortable about being openly gay, and society and the Church accepted and even embraced that.

Like many geniuses he was a perfectionist, but unlike most he was also an admitted procrastinator.  This led to many failures, and he learned to embrace it.  He knew when to stop and simply abandon a creative direction – whether it was art, a machine, or an anatomical investigation.  He would then take a step back, reflect on what was learned, and often try a radically different approach instead just an incremental adjustment.  He was conscious that what he was observing may not be the whole story – or even accurate – and believed a small change could be just a waste of time.

The three books impact completely different angles of thinking, but have made me ask more – and deeper – questions about thinking and observation.

When we’re enlightened enough to leave the conference room and visit the gemba to “observe reality” are we really seeing it?  In addition to the usual biases, are we able to recognize small ongoing activities that may compound to have a major impact in the future?  Is the inner Neanderthal in us skewing the impact of the negative over the positive?

Much has been written lately about Elon Musk and Tesla building Model 3s in a tent, with lots of inventory, fixing problems after the cars are built (like GM did decades ago), “nano management,” and pounding on people.  Seems like a trajectory to catastrophe, and I count myself in the camp of those that don’t want it to happen but believe it probably will.  But if we take Klosterman’s “look back from the future” perspective, what if these difficulties are the birth throes of something new and improved – perhaps even over lean and TPS?  Highly unlikely in my opinion, but I should be open to the possibility.  Can we discard the perspective of lean purism (or is it “puritanism”…?) and our own experiences with manufacturing and objectively consider it?

Failure is something we all deal with, in different ways.  Kata teaches us to try planned experiment after planned experiment, learning from the results of each and making small incremental changes to iterate to a desired future state.  But what if, in some cases, a better approach was to just say “screw it!” (ok, in a more reflective manner and creating some learning!) and point the arrow at a radically different place?  It’s not “scientific” (or maybe there could be some PDCA around that new radical direction?) but maybe it would save another year of iterating down a path that may not bear fruit?

The important point is to question what we are observing, thinking, and intuiting.  How are we affected by bias, by our framework and viewpoint, and by not fully understanding that context?  If we took a “look back from tomorrow” perspective, how would our thoughts change?

The Multi-Faceted Power of Walking

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Walking is man’s best medicine. – Hippocrates

Walking has become a much larger part of my life over the past few years.  It started when I embraced kinhin – walking meditation.  Walking slowly on the beach for an hour or so, one step per breath, barefoot and silent to engage all of the senses.  The mind is calmed, allowing reality and ideas to flow in.  Since then I’ve added regular walking, averaging over 15,000 steps a day, and actively trying to increase that average each week.

Over forty years ago, growing up in Peru, my parents would take us on grand walking tours of Lima and other cities every weekend.  Hours on end, probably a hundred miles or so a day – at least it seemed like that to a young kid.  I hated it at the time, but looking back I’m very thankful for the experience.  Living overseas widens perspectives and creates understanding and acceptance.

I lost that walking fever when I returned to the U.S. to go to college.  Perhaps it was the notorious icy blizzards of upstate New York, but somehow a walk down to the dorm kegerator seemed sufficient.  Anything else required begging a ride from someone lucky enough to own a car.  After college I’d use a car to drive a block to the store.  Pathetic.  And I didn’t realize what I was missing.  I did know I wasn’t missing the pounds that slowly crept onto someone who used to be on the high school swim team.

A few years ago, and especially over the last two years, I started to work hard to get into better shape.  Crossfit, running on the beach, even running a marathon.  It’s worked and I feel great (thanks, Paul Akers!).  But I realized that even though I looked for opportunities to exercise, I was still driving just a few blocks to the gym, post office, bank, and so forth.  Our little beach town isn’t large – just 10,000 people.  Is driving really necessary?

So one day I walked to the gym, then the next day to the post office, then the next day to lunch.  Within a week I was hooked.  Soon I was taking a few hours on Saturday morning to walk to the end of our 6 mile beach, and back.  Now when I travel I have to find time for walking.  While at the AME conference in Boston a few weeks ago I was able to convince a few colleagues to walk the several miles to dinner.  Great sights, great conversation, great exercise.

Morro Bay walkingYou see, I discovered it’s not just about exercise, although it’s amazing what just a few thousand steps a day will do to your body.

Walking calms your mind.  Even if you don’t formally practice kinhin, walking slowly, preferably without supplemental audio, lets your thoughts slow and settle.  After even a short walk you feel more balanced, upbeat, and creative.

Walking lets you (and teaches you?) observe at the speed of reality.  I’ve been surprised at what I’ve found in our small town, even though I’ve lived here for seventeen years.  Just the other day I noticed a plaque buried in what used to be a garden across the street from city hall.  Looking closer, I discovered it was in memory to a Hope Miller, and later I looked her up and learned an interesting story about our town.  I’m sad that the garden planted in her memory two decades ago has become unruly.  Maybe I’ll change that.

Walking lets you meet and get to know new people.  On my long walks I’ve met several neighbors, merchants, and tourists from around the world.  Some of these connections have turned into new friendships.  While walking to dinner at the AME conference I was able to get to learn more about a couple team members that I rarely see in person since we’re in different offices.

In the lean world we know the power of going to the gemba to observe the reality of the value creating process, to help team members see through your eyes, and to challenge processes.  Walking, even around your neighborhood, can be similar – and more.

Slip on those shoes, step outside, and take a few steps!

From Linear to Roundabout Thinking

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Ever since I visited Italy over a decade ago my inner geek has had a fascination with traffic engineering.  If you’ve visited Italy, or many similar places, you probably know why.  Traffic appears chaotic, thanks in part to what appears at first glance to be a lack of signals and other controls.  To those of us with highly-regimented traffic control systems this feels crazy and even scary.  Until we realize something:

Traffic flows continuously, pretty much everywhere.

Now it may not be a fast, but the net effect is often more flow than the stop-and-go signal-driven batch movement that exists in many U.S. cities.  Traffic engineers have recognized this as well, with many cities intentionally removing signals.

In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It’s called “second generation” traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and — of all subjects — evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it’s a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it’s about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

The psychology of this is particularly interesting.  In countries with highly-controlled traffic the emphasis has been on reducing chaos by removing human decisions.  This has had the negative effect of disengaging drivers (and pedestrians, bikers, etc.) from the environment, which can actually create more risk.

“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”

Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

Removing traditional signals can be scary or disturbing.  A first step is often replacing intersections with traffic circles, or roundabouts.  Those of us that have lived in the northeast U.S. know they are fairly common, but here on the west coast they’re still rare.

A few years ago my small town of 10,000 replaced a complex five-way intersection with a traffic circle.  Believe it or not, that circle reduced the number of stop lights in our town by 33% – from 3 to 2!  Even though the number of traffic accidents dropped to about zero and flow is far smoother, the community remains very divided.  I personally love it, and zip through the circle at least a couple times a day.

Now the city wants to replace one of the two remaining lights with another traffic circle.  Once again it makes a lot of sense as the intersection being considered is complex – three streets plus the on and off ramps for the Pacific Coast Highway.  One issue is that it is a half block from the high school, and some residents are concerned about kids walking and driving near a “dangerous circle.”

We have part of the community that has looked at the science described above, as well as the improved results from our first traffic circle, and are proponents of the new circle.  And we have another part that is analyzing the proposal on a more emotional level, often based on a handful of anecdotal close calls with the existing traffic circle, and legitimate and understandable concern about our school kids.  I don’t know what the city will decide.

It strikes me that this is very similar to what many of us have gone through with lean transformations.  Traditional batch manufacturing makes sense, and one piece flow feels counterintuitive.  Even after seeing it in action, perhaps even something as “real” as the envelope-stuffing exercise, dishwasher kaizen, or lean bathroom, it sometimes just doesn’t seem right.

Similarly, many organizations like having detailed and inflexible controls to ensure employees stay on the straight an narrow.  Innovative organizations like Netflix (and Gemba Academy!) intentionally remove policies and procedures to create more employee engagement.  Removing controls makes people think and be more aware of their environment.

Where does your organization have traditional signals that need to be replaced by free-flowing, people-engaging, roundabouts?

Monuments to the Lean Journey

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Nearly two decades ago I had left the medical device industry to jump into telecom photonics equipment.  My team was responsible for the operations side of a facility that was a recently-acquired startup in the space, with a product that became so popular it created an almost immediate 12-18 month backlog.  Nice problem to have, eh?  I thought so, which is why I jumped.  To top things off, it also happened to be located in one of the nicest small towns on the California central coast.

This was no average piece of equipment.  It was a large rack that could concurrently test up to 500 lasers used for long-haul fiber optic communications.  Depending on configuration a single rack could cost nearly a million dollars.

When I joined, the operations group was struggling to ship one unit a month, and orders were coming in a multiples of that.  With just a couple of exceptions no one had worked on a manufacturing floor before, let alone a lean one.  Partially-built racks were scattered around, parts were missing for most subassemblies, and a large amount of time was spent un-building racks to scavenge parts in hopes to complete one of the others.

The first thing I did was institute a morning stand up meeting.  We discussed and documented on a board the schedule and current status of all racks.  We then spent time on 5S to reduce “lost” parts, one piece flow to get out of the habit of partially building then un-building racks, and standard work to document processes.  There were many struggles and lots of educating on the sometimes counterintuitive perspective of lean.

Just five months later, in March 2001, we were shipping 10 racks a month, with the same floorspace and people.

Monument to LeanThe team was thrilled at what they accomplished, and they took certain liberties with the production bar chart that we would color in at each morning’s meeting.  Signatures, fish tank motifs, the overflowing water when we significantly overachieved the goal for the month.  I had it framed, and it has been hanging next to my desk at every subsequent position I’ve held.  You can click on the image to see a larger version.  Corporate management, 200 miles south, liked the dramatic change in cash flow, but never really understood how we did it.

That chart is my personal monument to lean.

It celebrates the power of lean, reminding me of how much value can be created in just a few short months.  But it also reminds me of many lessons, lean and otherwise.

You see, the month after this achievement, our customers suddenly realized that they had overbuilt long-haul fiber optic capacity.  We had seen a cancellation or two in the previous few months, considered them odd anomalies and didn’t dig deeper, but then over the next couple months the entire 18 month backlog was cancelled.  By August we were almost idle and hoping for orders, and on September 10th, 2001 – the day before 9/11 – the company announced that the operation would be closed and the product line discontinued.  From 0 to 100 to 0 in less than a year.

One lesson was that lean can create amazing improvements, but it can’t offset a lack of demand – and it’s imperative to keep a keen eye on external factors.

Our leadership team, sometimes against the wishes (or even the knowledge) of our corporate parent, did things right for the employees.  We negotiated significant severance, helped with job searches, and bent our ears and held many hands.  It was rough, but all of them eventually landed on their feet, locally or elsewhere.  Many of them went on to improve their new operations, demonstrating again that the true (compounding?) power of lean is in the teaching and knowledge of people – not just the tools.  Another lesson.

Monuments are interesting artifacts.  Not only do they celebrate the past and remind us of lessons, they continue to teach.

As I’ve continued on my own journey, new experiences add context and answers to what happened in the spring of 2001.  I’ve thought about how valuable it would have been to know about Training Within Industry – TWI – during those days.   Coincidentally, Gemba Academy has just released a series of videos on Job Relations, and earlier this year released a course on Job Instruction.  When I eventually got the top job at a multi-site medical device company, my monument continued to remind me of the power of people.  Just looking at it encouraged me to leave the office to spend time at the gemba.  Reporting to our board of directors I was reminded of how, back in 2001, I failed to educate my offsite corporate boss on how lean enabled the success of our photonics operation – and I took a different path.

Today my monument reminds me of the fragility of improvement, the importance of focus, and how critical it is to go beyond the gemba to see the value of your products from the eyes of your customer.  Most importantly, it reminds me of the power of people.  When times get tough I’ll reflect on my monument, conveniently only a couple feet away, and often see an answer.  Or at least realize that if I made it through those crazy times, I can make it through this one.

What are your monuments to the journey?  How are they still helping you today?

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